The Dynamite Room Read online

  All the color of the day was fading, while out to sea rain clouds were brewing again, another storm on its way.

  The shovel clanged against something metal and he got down on his knees to scuff the dirt away. The can was heavy and he struggled to pull it out of the hole by its handle, the petrol slopping around inside. Then with a spurt of laughter he held it up and said, “Your mother is a very resourceful lady. You know, I rather wish I’d met her.”

  Lydia said nothing and stared at the hole. I’m not helping him, she told herself. I’m doing this for me.

  He threw the shovel in among the vegetables and set off towards the garage. She looked up at the house and was suddenly filled with a fear that she might never see it again.

  She hurriedly collected her identity card, the maps, and her stories from beneath the broken floorboard under the piano, along with the crumpled and dusty documents—various marriage certificates and birth certificates—that had already been there. She packed them into her suitcase, along with some clothes; then she changed her mind and took the maps back out and, folding them, wedged them into her gas mask box, next to her mother’s letters.

  She watched him from the window tipping the broken radio into the hole in the garden where the petrol canister had been. He shoveled the soil back in and patted it down, and hauled the cherub back into place, straightening the boy until he was just so.

  He tossed the dead vegetables that he’d pulled up into the hedgerow at the back of the garden and raked through the sooty remnants of the bonfire, picking out one or two small discs that might have been buttons and pocketing them.

  Inside the house they set the rooms straight, turning everything back to how it was as if the last few days had been a dress rehearsal, and now that they had somehow muddled through, they could do it all for real. Beds were pushed back into place, the dining room straightened, candles and trinkets put back on the dresser; everything was just how her mother had left it. The blackout frames were pushed back into the windows, the nails pulled out of the back door so that it could be opened once more. He filled one of her mother’s cases with tins from the larder and a box of Weetabix and lugged it out to the car.

  She found the figure resting on the windowsill of her parents’ bedroom. A tiny matchstick figure propped against the glass, just like her father used to make. She picked him up and studied him, hardly believing what she was holding. Was it possible that he had come home, that he was there in the house with her, that he would take her in his arms and hold her? Don’t cry, missy. Don’t cry.

  She sat on her brother’s bed with his toy wooden soldier in her hands and shut her eyes. She could feel the warmth of his light behind her, the tingling of it across her skin. She could feel it glowing in her bones. Alfie. Dear Alfie.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered. “Come with me, Alfie. I need you to come with me.”

  She tried to feel a difference in the room, to feel him behind her, to feel that slight warmth, that glow, get stronger. Against the back of her eyelids she imagined him sitting on the ledge, just as he had been that night, his wings and his cricket whites and his bright blue eyes. She opened her eyes and turned to see him—hoping one last time—but the bedroom remained stubbornly empty.

  When it finally got dark, she was bundled into the car, her suitcase placed in the boot next to his kit bag and the suitcase of food. He handed her the picnic blanket so that she could wrap it over her knees when she got cold. Mr. Tabernacle was sitting in the back, his single gem of an eye so black that it looked like a finger hole in the darkness.

  She waited while he locked the door of the house and returned the key to beneath the stone cherub, then shut the double garage doors, scraping them through the gravel. He opened the driver’s side and climbed in. For a few moments he studied the switches around the instrument board and felt at the gear lever, and then he started the engine. It coughed and choked, rumbling into life with a clanking sound from somewhere beneath them. He undid the button on her father’s jacket and ran his fingers around the inside of the collar, then took a map from the pocket of his door and handed it to her.

  She looked at him. “Where are we going?” But he was concentrating on putting the car into gear. There was a grating sound and it jerked forward. He fumbled at the gear stick, and the car lurched again before setting off down the drive. She turned back to look at the house as they passed through the gateway and turned into the lane.

  As they made their way along the road she kept glancing behind her to see if she could see Greyfriars, if only its two chimney pots helplessly poking up from behind the trees, but eventually even they were gone. Her father had been made to remove one of the car lights. The one that still remained was screened so that only narrow slits of light could break through creating barely more than a haze. Heiden drove slowly but steadily, both hands on the wheel. His eyes were focused on the murky darkness ahead. She looked over the silhouetted hedgerows. In the far distance along the coastline, something was burning—a seething orange glow spreading up into the sky. Germans laying waste to the land. The smoke stained the night an even darker gray and then thinned out along a smudged line as if the sky was teasing it out into something soft and fine. A muffled boom echoed across the field and shuddered through the car. She wondered where he was taking her. A camp somewhere? Some military headquarters? Perhaps a field filled with tents. Or a field with nothing in it, that he would walk her out across until there was nothing and no one around, and then he would shoot her dead.

  They made their way along the lane, the engine rickety, and every joint and nut and bolt in the car seemed to judder and quake. The road was still slippery with rain, and littered with stones and twigs and chomped-up bits of concrete.

  Rain began to clatter at the windscreen. She looked about for Germans, but it would be the towns and cities that they would be after, he had told her; they would hardly bother capturing the fields. She wondered where her mother was, and Mr. Morton too, and Archie Chittock and Tommy Sparrow and the rest of the Local Defence Volunteers, and even Button—poor Button, she wished he was with her. There was another boom along the coast and the car swerved. He glanced at her, reassuring, and leaned further forward in his seat. She wrapped the picnic blanket around her legs. She could see the ridges of his knuckles gripping hard at the wheel.

  They stopped to drag a rusting bedstead out of the way and a broken handcart that had been set out as a vain attempt to block the road. When they reached the village the streets were deserted. Glass from the broken windows of Pringle’s shop was blown across the street, and it crinkled and crunched under the tires as they drove through. The unlit streetlights stood sorry headed. The blacked-out windows were dead and lifeless. Some of the front doors were broken through, and she glanced around for shadows moving—any sign of life. They swerved around a blown-out oil canister that looked as if something dreadful had erupted from it. There were coils of wire across the side streets and numbers painted large and white on front doors. And then the village was gone and the road took them through the blackened fields. As she realized how hopeless everything was, she thought she might be sick.

  They skirted the edge of Rendlesham Forest and drove out onto the open heath.

  Eventually he slowed and without warning pulled into a gateway. With the flick of a switch the car fell silent, and the vague light against the tangle of gorse was gone. He didn’t look at her but stared out of the window at the darkness around them. He would kill her now, out on the heath. He would drag her body away from the road and leave it under the gorse and nobody would find her for days or weeks or years. She could feel herself tightening so much that she might crack or burst or scream. She pressed herself into the seat and fumbled for the door handle.

  “Don’t,” he said without turning.

  She could see his heavy form next to her but his face was in shadow. She heard his breath, the trawl of it like the sea. His hands slowly released the steering wheel.

  “There are things
I want to discuss with you, Lydia.”

  “Things?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  He turned to look at her. “No. No, I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Then will you let me go?”

  “No. I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”

  “Why not? I won’t tell anyone that I’ve seen you. I won’t say anything, I promise.”

  “We need to be together now, Lydia. We need to help each other.”

  “But…where are we going?”

  “We are going to the Cotswolds,” he said. “Have you been? I think you’re going to like it. It’s ever so pretty. I know a little cottage there that we can live in. It used to belong to a friend of mine, a professor I once knew. No one is living there now. We can make it ours for a while.”

  “Ours?” She didn’t understand.

  “Yes. While we decide what to do.”

  What about the Germans, the invasion? She had been quite sure that he was going to take her to a camp.

  “Have you ever wanted to change your name, Lydia—to call yourself something else?”

  She looked at her reflection in the side window, the rain pummeling down her face in watery rivulets. The storm battered at the roof of the car. She turned back to him.

  “I can’t go with you,” she said. “Wherever you’re going…We have to find my mother. You promised.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “And all in good time. I think we are going to be very happy.”

  He seemed suddenly uncertain. What had they stopped for? Was he sick? She had heard about soldiers that had seen dreadful things turning crazy, mad.

  “This is what I wanted to talk to you about. We need to make an agreement,” he told her. “When we reach the checkpoint, we will have to show them some identification, proof of who we are, where we live…and I am going to be your father.”

  “My—what?”

  “I have his papers, his clothes, everything I need.”

  She stared at him.

  “Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m saying, Lydia?”

  Yes. Slowly she was understanding—everything that he had done. The jacket, shirt, braces, shoes, the side parting in his hair, the slight change in the way he moved, the way he talked, him practicing words that were new to him like tapioca and cauliflower cheese. All his snooping around, his collecting information.

  She stared harder and tried to think of her father’s face, but all she could see was the man sitting next to her, a man who wasn’t her father, who was quite mad—she understood that now.

  He clicked his finger and thumb at her.

  “Are you listening? You have to pay attention, Lydia. Listen. We are going to a house that we are renting in the Cotswolds. That is what we are going to say. We are meeting your mother there, and I am your father. You tell them that, if they ask. If they ask you anything else, you agree with whatever I say. Otherwise, you say nothing. Do you understand?”

  She looked at him. “Do you understand?” he said. “We need to get this right.”

  “What happens when my father comes back?”

  He stared through the windscreen as the rain swept across it in currents.

  “My real father,” she said.

  “And what if he’s dead?” he said. “What if he doesn’t come back, Lydia? Have you thought about that? You see, we find ourselves here in a bit of a situation, you and me. I mean, look at me, here in his clothes, in his car, with his documents, with his daughter, and looking just like him. Right now, no one but you would know. So, if they ask you, you tell them that I’m him, your father. Otherwise we won’t get through. It’s as simple as that. We just need to get through, and then we’ll sort it out.”

  She stared at him. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She shook her head.

  “Do you want any chance of seeing your mother again?” he said. “If you don’t arouse their suspicions they’ll let us pass and there will be no reason to be afraid. I promise. Or do you want me to kill you? Because I will have to do that if you don’t do what I say.”

  She began to cry. She didn’t believe any of his promises anymore. How could she believe anything that he said? She looked at the windscreen and saw her father’s face in it, a face that looked so much like hers, so much like his. She had the vague notion of someone talking, someone speaking right beside her.

  “Listen to me. What I am telling you is the truth. Your father is gone.”

  “He’s not gone. He’s on a ship.”

  “But I can take his place. You can come with me and I can love you, I can look after you, I promise. I can be him in every way, any way you want—”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  It was all she could manage.

  “What if your mother is dead too? Think about that, Lydia. What if there is no one left? Who will look after you? Where will you go? What will you do? Have you thought about that? Have you? Who will feed you? Who will clothe you, Lydia? Who is going to care?”

  Her tears streamed now thick and heavy.

  “I can look after you,” he said. “I can help you, I promise, with whatever you want. You just have to say it. You just have to tell them I’m your father, and come with me to the Cotswolds and to the cottage. We’ll hide away there for a while. We’ll be safe. And then we can do whatever we like. We can go anywhere. Be anyone we want.”

  She shut her eyes and felt the heat of the tears burning lines down her face.

  “Please,” he said. “Please.”

  As the car drove on she felt strangely numb to everything. The storm clouds pulled back across the sky and the rain eased. The car smelled damp and muggy. She stared at herself in the window. She didn’t know what to do.

  They passed a blown-up pillbox behind a hedge. She could hear the low drone of aircraft somewhere above them. She looked at the map in her lap but it was too dark to make anything out of it other than a tangle of roads and rivers. She had no idea of how to get them to the Cotswolds, or even where they were now that all the signposts had been taken down. He slowly maneuvered the car around logs in the road and an old railway sleeper. Further on, they had to drive up onto the verge to get around an old Morris Eight dumped in the middle of the road and completely filled with earth. It reminded her of the house on the beach that she had imagined filled to the roof with shingle, and the people who had lived inside, their throats filled with sand and grit and tiny crabs. She remembered the line of shells laid out down to the shore for the sea nymphs to follow. She would follow it now if she were there, all the way in.

  The roadblock was simple enough, made of the trunk of a pine tree coiled with barbed wire and balanced between the joints of two smaller trunks that had been dug into the ground and acted as a gate. Three uniformed men manned it. One stood in the road and stopped each vehicle; another waited at the makeshift gate; and a third, younger than the others, ferried back and forth, helping first the man who was interrogating each driver and then running back to help his colleague lift the gate so that the vehicle could pass through. On one side of the road was a hexagonal pillbox, outside of which was a lit stove nestled in the grass. The makeshift gate was hauled up again and a truck passed through. Between the roadblock and the Crossley were two other cars, both black. Heiden mumbled something and slowed the car down to a crawl. Her heart was beating fast.

  “Okay. If you remember what we talked about,” he said, “everything will be all right.” He lightly touched the back of her hand with his. “Yes?”

  She felt the tingle in her skin where the tips of his fingers had made contact with her, and she nodded. It was as if, in that one touch, he had made her his.

  “Now wipe your tears,” he said.

  They pulled up behind the car in front, the dim light of their headlight washing over its boot and bumper. It was a black, muddy Hillman Minx, a single man inside with his arm hanging out of the window. The jacket was tweed and dirty. Ahead of the Hill
man was a larger car, and the two soldiers were questioning the driver and his passengers. Both soldiers stooped to speak through the window.

  She looked through the side window at the woods beyond.

  My father, she said to herself. He’s my father.

  If she did not mean it perhaps it would not matter.

  The car up front pulled away under the makeshift barrier, and Heiden put their own car into gear and edged them forward.

  As the two soldiers came to the window of the Hillman Minx just in front of them, she saw their uniforms more clearly. It was unmistakable—the armbands had the letters LDV.

  “They’re Local Defence Volunteers,” she said. “They’re English!”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But the invasion…We heard it on the radio! The announcement!”

  He turned and looked at her, but he said nothing.

  “But…”

  She desperately tried to remember the announcer she had heard on the radio. He had said something about London. She was sure of it. The name. But what else? Was it only that? The word London? It was Heiden who had said that it had fallen, and she had believed him, not questioned it. So, what had they prepared the house for? Who had they been waiting for? One man—Diederich—now dead? Had it all been a lie? And was this why he was pretending to be English? He wouldn’t have wanted to take on a British identity if the Nazis had already invaded, but he would if he was the only German here, if there had been no German landing and England was still England and not overrun at all.